Distressing Boards to look like ‘Barn Boards’ {Sawdust and Embryos}

Howdy hey my ATT lovlies! It’s Beth stopping in from Sawdust and Embryos once again! It’s definitely one of the highlights of my month to drop in on you guys and show you what we’ve been up to. HUGE thanks to our girl Brooke for giving me this amazing opportunity! I’m still pinching myself!

If you haven’t had the opportunity, we wanted to welcome you to stop on over to our blog and snoop around for a bit. We get down and dirty with our DIY tutorials, parenting twins, random daily rantings, and our open struggle with infertility (hence the ‘embryos’)!

So… today I wanted to show you a little technique that we use to make cheap pine boards look all weathered and barn-board-ish. It’s SO simple, and can be used for so many different projects. Just some more awesome knowledge to tuck under your DIY belt!

We started out with these cheap-o 1×4 pine boards. And by cheap, I mean $1.82 for an 8 FOOT BOARD. Wha? It’s true.

They look so crisp and new… you just WAIT!

First I chose some paint colors based on the look I was going for. You can use as many or as few colors as you want, and ANY color combination. That’s the beauty of it. You just can’t go wrong.

Next, I took a dry brush and just lightly brushed paint on here and there, using a different combo of paint for each board. You don’t want to cover it completely. And some boards van have more paint than others. You want to be ‘purposefully random’!

After letting that dry overnight, I went at it with some pretty hefty sandpaper (40 grit). This is the fun part by far… and you don’t have to put much elbow grease into it. You want to sand until you can see the woodgrain through the paint. Like SO:

Some boards I sand more than others. I use my spidey-sense to make these decisions.

You might be tempted to stop there… because they look pretty darn ‘weathered’! But the next step is what REALLY makes them pop. Just trust me on this one!

Wipe your boards free of all the sawdust, and then slap on some stain! We use Minwax Provincial (because it’s our fave rich brown with NO red tint), but you can use whatever you have on hand… although the lighter stains might not look as awesome.

I quickly stained my boards, and then immediately went back and started wiping them off with a cloth, starting with the first one’s I stained.

Ugh… would you look at that grain? Think of all the SWEET things you could do with these!

Can you believe that’s it? PAINT… SAIND… STAIN… it doesn’t get more simple than that!

We did several batches of these (with different color combos), and made some barn board ‘signs’ to give away to our loved ones. Here are some examples.

(Tutorial for painting on the lettering HERE)

There are SO many ideas that I have swimming around in my head for what to use these distressed boards for. Wouldn’t it make for an AMAZING accent wall covered in these boards? Hmmmmmm!

Thanks again to Brooke and her awesome readers (SUCK-UP!) for letting me stop in! Nick and I hope that you’ll have the confidence to give this a whirl! And we desperately hope you’ll email us pictures when you’re done!

This post couldn't have come at a better time. Just yesterday I was looking for reclaimed wood to add to the sides of my kitchen cabinets which I plan on painting. I want to give them some rustic appeal but the price for the reclaimed wood was astronomical. Obviously I'm trying to save costs, otherwise I'd be putting in a new kitchen instead of painting my cabinets so I wasn't happy about the cost but would have probably gone that route but for seeing this post! Now I can make my splurge the brass hardware instead:)

Seriously? One of the neatest ideas I’ve seen – Holy Dinah, I’m so excited to try out some of the ideas on your site!! I’ve painted a lot of furniture but I’m always nervous to try new ideas, but this one seems fool proof 😉
~Kylie

I love this idea! And that the boards are so cheap! I want to make a photo display out of old barn boards for an anniversary party, but I’m not sure where to find the kind of boards you used. I may have just over read it while reading this post, but where did you find them?

So I am trying to get this look on my already very distressed wooden deck (not currently distressed in a cool way)… I’ll have to send you a pic if it works out! This is such a temporary fix till we rip the thing out, but I can’t look at it another day the way it is! Fingers crossed! LOVE YOUR SITE!

[…] researching projects that others have done such as this amazing wood wall and these beautiful antiqued boards. We started to feel confident that we could tackle this project ourselves and save a boatload of […]

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